ISSN 1751-8229 Volume Three, Number Three Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists? – Part 2 Nathan Coombs, Royal Holloway, University of London In Part 1 of this article we argued that Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou’s account of the foundation of Communist universalism in the event of Christianity signals a number of inconsistencies immanent to their respective ontologies (Coombs 2009). For Žižek it appears difficult to reconcile his touted open interpretation of Hegel with the ontological significance he accords to Christianity; whereas for Badiou, the ‘foundation of universalism’ attributed to St. Paul’s militant ‘truth procedure’ of universalising the Christian faith and effecting a split with Judaism appears to contradict his ontology of inconsistent multiplicity, which denies historical or evental foundations. Still, this critique only takes us so far in undermining the ‘Christian hegemony’ of a certain school of ‘post-modern’ Communist theory. Instead, if we can demonstrate that even the conditions by which they violate their own systems are present elsewhere, then the essentialist platform of ‘Paulian materialism’ and its exclusivist foundations come to look even more shaky – shaky to the point of collapse. These conditions we can also find in IslamΨ. A scholar of Islamic or Middle Eastern Studies will notice a rather erratic transliteration of Farsi and Arabic words and names into English in this article. This is because the sources cited in this piece use a multitude of different transliterations and owing to the fact that this author is not a scholar trained 1 Firstly, however, it is important to differentiate our argument from Ian Almond’s The New Orientalists (2007) – the most prescient scholarship on the matter. Because although Almond manages to locate the spectre of Islam in post-modern philosophy from Nietzsche to Foucault, the pre-suppositions of his critique means it has the curious feature of bouncing back off his targets in the manner of an echo chamber. Unlike Edward Said’s polemic against the colonial representation and construction of the Orient in his canonical Orientalism (1979), there is a post-modern twist in Almond’s study that even Alain Badiou might find satisfying. What Almond traces is not so much the brutal violence of representation, but a lineage of absence, or ‘ghostly demarcations’, by which Islam asserts itself in the interstices and footnotes of post-modern philosophy. None of the philosophers in his study (we except here the authors Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushie and Jorge Luis Borges) have ever made explicit claims to scholarship on Islam and have only discussed the religion at those points where it has intersected with ‘Western affairs.’ That includes Michel Foucault’s fascination with Shiism in his reportage on the Iranian revolution; the simulacrum of Islam Jean Baudrillard found refracted in the Gulf War; and Slavoj Žižek’s passing remarks on the religion in connection with 9/11 and the Iraq War. In regard to his chapter on Žižek, Almond writes “Islam is conspicuous by its absence” (ibid: 177) as well as being a “casualty of this ‘other’ Eurocentrism of Žižek’s – the semantic denial of any ontological depth or even tangibility to the marginalized subject.” (ibid: 183) Unfortunately, this tension in Almond’s critique never allows it to penetrate deeper than a genealogy of marginality. For the absence of the representation of Islam in Žižek’s work cannot at the same time be a great violence against it. And furthermore, when Almond argues that “in Žižek’s work, if we scratch the skin of a Muslim, sooner or later we find a socialist underneath” this is because of Žižek’s “considerations on the Jamesonian concept of the ‘vanishing mediator’ – the mechanism by which a belief may facilitate the emergence of another belief-system, and render itself obsolete in the process.” (ibid: 191) – to which Žižek might simply reply: ‘exactly’! Almond thus excoriates Žižek on the basis of a series of a priori assertions – i.e. the Eurocentrism of Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis etc. – and for the resulting lack of respect for the true Otherness of Islam; whilst at the same time bemoaning the absence of this Otherness in Žižek’s specifically within the field, adopting and rigorously following any one system would be needlessly time consuming and considered only of great consequence for a specialist. Since the aim of this article is to break down the barriers between contemporary continental philosophy and Islamic studies it is hoped that the arguments will suffice; even if technical conventions are sometimes flouted. This author has at least attempted to be consistent in his use of individual transliterated words and names throughout and for the sake of consistency has removed inter-syllabic marks, e.g. Shi’a becomes Shia etc. 2 representations of religions of which are not Other to him. In other words, Almond’s critique remains nested in the very ideology of multicultural inclusion and non-judgemental tolerance that Žižek has spent so much theoretical energy attempting to combat. To draw a sharp contrast, what we are aiming for here is a different critique to Almond’s in that we share many of the same principles as Badiou and Žižek, but rather see their Christian essentialism as a deviation from the tenets of their own systems, not just as an expression of their hopelessly Eurocentric gaze on the world. In Part 1 of the article we saw the close affiliation of Badiou and Žižek’s valorisation of Christianity’s universalism with Hegel’s exaltation of the ‘Absolute religion’ and for our purpose here again Hegel will be an important touch-point. The problem with Hegel we will explore is not necessarily the provincialism of his positioning of Islam under the ‘Germanic World’; but rather, like in Badiou and Zizek’s fleeting representations of Islam, the problem lies in Hegel’s inability to see beyond the abstract idea of Islam to its actual particularities. But it is only by taking Hegel at his word that we can see the immanent inadequacy of his schematisation of Islam as a religion of purely abstract universality. Not because it represents an unacceptably malign value judgement (such a criticism would remain within the realm of non-judgemental multiculturalism and respect for Otherness); rather because the particular details of Islam actually contradict Hegel’s judgement, even if we were to accept the truth of his criteria of judgement. This particularity is most notably expressed in the split between Sunni and Shia and what these splits have meant in practice for the politics and historicity of the religion. Further, once we see that the fact of this split forecloses any essentialist philosophical identity to Islam we also have the material by which to undermine any essentialist reading of Christianity at the foundation of universalism. To strengthen the case, in the second part of this article, we examine two of the key ideologues of the Iranian revolution: Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari and Ali Shariati. Their debate and rivalry on the pre-revolutionary scene in Iran we will argue focuses on their differing interpretations of revolutionary Shia Islam: Motahhari’s dialectical conception and Ali Shariati’s militant, evental conception – which echoes Badiou’s emphasis on Paul’s truth procedure. Although sensitive to the fact that some may see the reading of the Sunni/Shia split through Hegel and the Mottahari/Shariati debate through the dialectics/event split we have located in Badiou and Žižek as a form of transcription into ‘Westernese’; in the spirit of Enlightenment and universality that this writer shares with the authors he is critiquing, this is considered not so important as highlighting some of the 3 shared philosophical problems of two of the world’s universal religions. And more, we hope to demonstrate the respect and awe in the face of the supposed Otherness of Islam is part and parcel of the problem of how Christianity becomes essentialised and posited as a foundation by the exclusion of its counterpart universal religion. HEGEL AND ISLAM It is worth considering Hegel’s reflections on Islam, not to snigger at their bold-faced Christian chauvinism, but to understand them as still implicit within the predominant understandings of Islam suppressed even within the non-judgemental, multiculturalist discursive framework: a framework forced to distinguish between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’, ‘modernists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ etc. For all the formal procedures of denouncing teleological thinking in contemporary culture, there is nevertheless the association of Christianity – or at least Protestantism - as possessing the telos of secularism; and Islam, lumped in with Judaism and Hinduism etc., as being somehow stuck in the past, unable to secede itself into a true modernity. This perspective is reflected in Hegelian teleology, where Islam is neither consigned as a more primitive religion, nor dialectically incorporated into any part of the unfolding of the Notion towards Christian perfection. As W.T.Stace remarks: “It is a very curious omission on Hegel’s part that although he has numerous scattered references to the religion of Islam, he assigns it no place in his history of religion.” (1955: 491) For Hegel Islam went further than any other religion in abstracting the unity of God into a universal One, the movement to which marks the increasing perfection of the world religions in the Philosophy of History. But whereas this process of extracting the divine into abstract universality has a dialectical necessity in the unfolding towards the Notion, Hegel claims that it is because of the extremity of the abstraction in Islam that particularity and the universal are unresolved into the higher individuality of Christian worship. In other words, without the recognition that the Son of God died on the cross, there remains an unresolved bridge between humanity and God that leaves the individual separated from divine unicity and mankind separated from realising that its destiny lies within itself.